Research and development of Chinese LCA database and LCA software

This paper detailed introduces the related work for building Chinese National Database, Sinocenter, of materials life cycle assessment (MLCA) and developing the environmental burden dataset of materials. The MLCA database was built in 2004, and the basic framework mainly includes LCA methodology, materials environmental dataset about energy consumption, resource input and environmental emissions. Nowadays, the database contains about fifty-thousand records of the main materials industries, such as cement, iron and steel, nonferrous metal, etc., and also includes the primary LCI data of fossil fuels and electricity grid in China. At the same time, the LCA method localization work is going on, for instance, calculated the resource characterization factors of 42 kinds of metal and 58 sorts of nonmetal, and also obtained some heavy metal impact factors in water. Based on the database, the iron and steel dataset has been developed with the data quality analysis, and some environmental burden data could be queried in our website, www.cnmlca.com, in the future. Lastly, according to the framework of the ISO14040 series standards, the antitype of Chinese LCA evaluation system was developed to support materials and products LCA evaluation in China.